


one of those nights / city lights

by wantonwasting



Category: DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2019-03-02 01:10:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13307223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wantonwasting/pseuds/wantonwasting
Summary: On emptiness.





	one of those nights / city lights

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I can’t sleep, so pretentious former lit student scrawls below (aka sometimes I try to write pretty sentences but its hard to sustain).

It’s one of those nights. Koujaku can’t sleep, so he sits next to the window and smokes, watching the lights over Midorijima while his mind is thousands of miles away. The lights from Noiz’s computers, set up against the back wall of the lounge room, play over his face. The interplay of light and shadow and light again obscures his expression, but even if the light had been steady, his thoughts were not clearly read on his face.

Noiz works in silence; his gaze darts from one screen to another as the algorithms to track the new form of Rhyme ping more and more information through for him to sort through. The click-click-click of his keyboard fills the room instead of words, and though it takes most of his attention to ensure every piece of information was sorted to where it belonged in the calculations, he could spare enough to glance up at Koujaku now and then.

Koujaku drinks deeply from the sake cup, draining it all at once. It tastes mostly like smoke from his cigarette but that’s fine - it’s the burning he wants, better inside than spread across his back and so much easier to swallow than the rage that sometimes fills his veins and clouds his head. But it isn’t really the rage tonight, either, that has him watching the city skyline. It’s the emptiness, the void that has long since settled into his chest. It sleeps, for the most part, beneath the mundane passing of his daily life; but when it stirs, it sinks into every part of him, every part of his body under his stained skin, into every drop of blood that remains unspilt in his veins.

He cannot fight it - who can fight nothingness? - so he sits instead and watches the twinkling artificial lights, and does not think of anything at all.

He is brought back to life, to the present, when he feels fingers entwine with his. The computers are dark and dormant now, and though he looks up, in the dimness he cannot see the expression on Noiz’s face. But the warmth of his hand is spreading through Koujaku’s hands like osmosis. It doesn’t burn like the sake.

Noiz says nothing, and Koujaku knows that he knows. Koujaku wonders when this surprising tenderness had grown, or if, perhaps, Noiz had always had it. Perhaps that was why he had been hurt so deeply in his past. Perhaps that was why there was emptiness inside his chest too, and why Koujaku could feel it when their skin pressed close together, like it was now with their hands. Like it was those nights when they pressed their lips and bodies together too in search of respite from that void.

Koujaku wonders sometimes if that emptiness could explode in a fit of violence and rage and cover the world in deep red blood. Or would it would do the opposite, and slowly recede until there was not a trace of it, until he was full inside and satiated? He could chase those ouroboros thoughts all night, but the warmth in his hand was dragging him back to reality, back to life from the silence in his head.

With the release of breath he had not noticed drawing, Koujaku slides the window shut. The insistent tug of those fingers drags him from his place at the window to bed. Though Noiz does not speak, Koujaku is only aware now of the softness of his mattress and the arms around his waist. He does not hear the sounds outside, of drunken ruffians or the crash of bins. He only hears the soft breath near his ear. Noiz has his eyes closed though Koujaku knows that he is not sleeping; his grip is too tight, too insistent, and he is not pretending to be asleep either. It’s darker here than before in the lounge room, but Koujaku finds he does not need to see, not now when he feels warm, so he closes his eyes and falls into darkness.

The silence is different now; it’s not emptiness. Little by little, the emptiness crawls back inside his chest and he presses it down into a box and locks it away there once more.

He does not notice, but the box has gotten smaller.

It gets smaller every warm night.


End file.
